Buy Landon's Book!

“This book is going to change how we all view autism.” Karla Fisher (Senior Program Manager/Engineering Manager at Intel, mentor for autistic youth)

I Love Being My Own Autistic Self is a funny and upbeat book for autistic people, their families, and others who care about them. Author Landon Bryce uses a colorful cast of cartoon characters to gently introduce neurodiversity, the idea that neurological differences should be respected and valued.

“This comic is BEAUTIFUL! I want to share it with everyone with any connection to autism. It's a great primer for novices, and an excellent reality check for almost everyone who thinks they understand autism.” Noah Britton (public member of the the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, founding member of the comedy group Aspergers Are Us, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Massachusetts)

User login

Who's online

There are currently 0 users and 16 guests online.

Syndicate

Support thAutcast

Why not give a few dollars to help keep thAutcast going?

Seriously-- if you find the site useful (or promising) enough that you'd like to see it stay around, please consider giving even two or three dollars to help me pay for a more reliable server and a little bit of advertising. It would make a big difference.

Autism Is For Boys, Anorexia Is For Girls

The thing that makes Simon Baron-Cohen genuinely dangerous is that his half-truths about autism become a foundation for others to build on. Jennifer Bremser provides a particularly obnoxious example of this with her theory of the "extreme female brain." Baron-Cohen thinks autism is an "extreme male brain" in part because more males than females are diagnosed with it. So, since more females than males have diagnosed eating disorders, why not assume that anorexia is a manifestation of the extreme female brain?

Clinicians will often ask whether someone is a vegetarian, because it is a good predictor of whether that person is vulnerable to an eating disorder. This connection is generally understood in terms of health-conscious, restrictive eating patterns that go along with disordered eating. But we have started to ask whether maybe it is a reflection of greater emphasising – a person with the extreme female brain could be expected to be more sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, and more likely to choose a vegetarian path.

People use autism as a megaphone to amplify their own agendas. The pop science approach taken by Baron-Cohen encourages opportunists like Bremser to use us in this way.